Quintessential universe

The growth of cosmic structure when the Universe was 0,9 billion, 3,2 billion and 13,7 billion years old (now), showing how it has evolved from a smooth state to one containing a vast amount of structure.

The composite image is of the galaxy cluster Abell 85, located about 740 million light years from Earth "â€œ one of 86 observed by Chandra to trace how dark energy has stifled the growth of these massive structures over the past 7 billion years.

Scientists begin to unravel the mysteries of dark energy. So far, Einstein is looking good.
By David F Salisbury

Imagine a time when the entire Universe froze. According to a new model for dark energy, that is essentially what happened about 11,5 billion years ago, when the Universe was a quarter of the size it is today.

A cosmological phase transition – similar to freezing – is one of the distinctive aspects of this latest effort to account for dark energy, the mysterious negative force that cosmologists now think makes up more than 70 per cent of all the energy and matter in the Universe and is pushing it apart at an ever-faster rate.

Another feature that distinguishes the new formulation is that it makes a testable prediction regarding the expansion rate of the Universe. In addition, the micro-explosions created by the largest particle colliders should excite the dark energy field and these excitations could appear as exotic, never-seen-before sub-atomic particles.

The new model, published online in the journal Physical Review D, was developed by researcher Sourish Dutta and Professor of Physics Robert Scherrer at Vanderbilt University, working with Professor of Physics Stephen Hsu and graduate student David Reeb at the University of Oregon. “One of the things that is very unsatisfying about many of the existing explanations for dark energy is that they are difficult to test,” says Scherrer, “We designed a model that can interact with normal matter and so has observable consequences.”

The model associates dark energy with something called vacuum energy. Like a number of existing theories, it proposes that space itself is the source of the repulsive energy that is pushing the Universe apart. For many years, scientists thought that the energy of empty space averaged zero. But the discovery of quantum mechanics changed this view. According to quantum theory, empty space is filled with pairs of “virtual” particles that spontaneously pop into and out of existence too quickly to be detected.

This subatomic activity is a logical source for dark energy because both are spread uniformly throughout space. This distribution is consistent with evidence that the average density of dark energy has remained constant as the Universe has expanded. This characteristic is in direct contrast to ordinary matter and energy, which become increasingly dilute as the Universe inflates. The theory is one of those that attribute dark energy to an entirely new field dubbed quintessence.

Quintessence is comparable to other basic fields such as gravity and electromagnetism, but has some unique properties. For one thing, it is the same strength throughout the Universe. Another important feature is that it acts like an antigravity agent, causing objects to move away from each other instead of pulling them together like gravity.

In its simplest form, the strength of the quintessence field remains constant through time. In this case it plays the role of the cosmological constant, a term that Albert Einstein added to the theory of general relativity to keep the Universe from contracting under the force of gravity. When evidence that the Universe is expanding came in, Einstein dropped the term, since an expanding Universe is a solution to the equations of general relativity.

Then, in the late 1990s, studies of supernovas (spectacular stellar explosions so powerful that they can briefly outshine entire galaxies consisting of millions of stars) indicated that the Universe is not just expanding, but also that the rate of expansion is speeding up instead of slowing down, as scientists had expected. That threw cosmologists for a loop, since they thought gravity was the only longrange force acting between astronomical objects.

They had no idea what could possibly be pushing everything apart. The simplest way to account for this bizarre phenomenon was to bring back Einstein’s cosmological constant with its antigravity properties. Unfortunately, this explanation suffers from some severe drawbacks, so physicists have been actively searching for other antigravity agents.

These antigravity agents (dubbed “dark energy models” in the technical literature) usually invoke quintessence or even more exotic fields because none of these fields has been detected in Nature. However, their proponents generally assume that they do not interact significantly with ordinary matter and radiation.

One of the consequences of allowing quintessence to interact with ordinary matter is the likelihood that the field went through a phase transition – froze out – when the Universe cooled down to a temperature that it reached 2,2 billion years after the Big Bang. As a result, the energy density of the quintessence field would have remained at a relatively high level until the phase transition, when it abruptly dropped to a significantly lower level, where it has remained ever since.

This transition would have released a fraction of the dark energy held in the field in the form of dark radiation. According to the model, this dark radiation is very different from light, radio waves, microwaves and other types of ordinary radiation: it is completely undetectable by any instrument known to man. However, Nature provides a detection method.

According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, gravity is produced by the distribution of energy and momentum – so the changes in net energy and momentum caused by the sudden introduction of dark radiation should have affected the gravitational field of the Universe in a way that has slowed its expansion in a characteristic fashion.

In the next 10 years or so, the large astronomical surveys that are just starting up to plot the expansion of the Universe by measuring the brightness of the most distant supernovas should be able to detect the slowdown in the expansion rate that the model predicts. At the same time, new particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider can produce energies that are theoretically large enough to excite the quintessence field. These excitations could appear as new exotic particles, say the researchers.Source: Vanderbilt University

Dark energy stifles growth in the universe

For the first time, astronomers have clearly seen the effects of dark energy on the most massive collapsed objects in the Universe, using Nasa’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. By tracking how dark energy has stifled the growth of galaxy clusters, and combining this with previous studies, scientists have obtained the best clues yet about what dark energy is and what the destiny of the Universe could be.

“This result could be described as ‘arrested development of the Universe’,” says Alexey Vikhlinin of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the research. “Whatever is forcing the expansion of the Universe to speed up is also forcing its development to slow down.”

Vikhlinin and his colleagues used Chandra to observe the hot gas in dozens of galaxy clusters – the largest collapsed objects in the Universe. Some of these are relatively close and others are more than halfway across the Universe. The results show that the increase in mass of the galaxy clusters over time aligns with a Universe dominated by dark energy.

Says Vikhlinin: “Putting all of this data together gives us the strongest evidence yet that dark energy is the cosmological constant; in other words, that ‘nothing weighs something’. A lot more testing is needed, but so far Einstein’s theory is looking as good as ever.”

If dark energy is indeed explained by the cosmological constant, then the expansion of the Universe will continue to accelerate, and the Milky Way and its neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda, will never merge with the Virgo cluster. In that case, about a hundred billion years from now, all other galaxies would ultimately disappear from the Milky Way’s view and, eventually, the local superclusters of galaxies would also disintegrate.

In other words, it will end not with another bang, but barely a whimper.